Pakistani forces attack militants near crash site

KALLAY, Pakistan (Reuters) - Pakistani helicopter gunships attacked Taliban militants on Saturday in a northwestern region where a military helicopter crashed the previous day killing 26 soldiers on board, a government official said.

Fighting has intensified sharply in northwest Pakistan over the past two months since the army went on the offensive to push back an expanding insurgency that raised fears for the stability of the nuclear-armed U.S. ally.

The helicopter crashed on Friday because of a technical fault about 20 km (12 miles) from the city of Peshawar on the mountainous border of the Orakzai and Khyber ethnic Pashtun tribal regions, the military said.

On Saturday, army helicopters attacked a militant position in the same area, a government official said.

"They struck a militant bunker on a peak. We went there after the attack and found 10 bodies lying there," Khaista Rehman, a government official based in Kallay, the main town in the Orakzai region, told Reuters.

All of the bodies from the crashed helicopter had been recovered, the military said.

Soldiers have been fighting Taliban militants in the Swat valley, northwest of Islamabad, since early May and have stepped up pressure on Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, in his South Waziristan stronghold near the Afghan border.

Pakistan's civilian government has said it is determined to fight militancy and defeat Mehsud.

U.S. officials have welcomed the offensive after earlier voicing fears about Pakistan's stability and the safety of its nuclear arsenal.

As fighting intensifies in northwest Pakistan, U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan have also gone on the offensive.

Thousands of U.S. Marines and some British troops launched a big push against the Afghan Taliban in the southern Afghan province of Helmand on Thursday.

Helmand shares a 200-km (130-mile) desert border with the southwestern Pakistani province of Baluchistan and the Pakistani army has sent soldiers there to block any Taliban fleeing.

The Pakistani military says it is nearing the end of the offensive in the former tourist valley of Swat, although soldiers are encountering pockets of fighters, and it has been preparing for an offensive against Mehsud.

(Reporting by Hasan Orakzai; Editing by Robert Birsel and Valerie Lee)